CITY LORE

CITY LORE; The Day the Firemen Went on Strike

By MICHELLE O'DONNELL

Published: November 2, 2003

AT an early morning fire in a Jamaica, Queens, furniture store, a Fire Department lieutenant runs straight to a telephone booth to call for permission to fight the blaze. Civilians try to put it out, but they have no protective gear. A union official arrives and orders everyone away, while firefighters, dressed in street clothes and bright stocking caps, stand idly by and shout taunts. ''These stupid firemen, they're arguing with each other while this building burns to the ground,'' a bystander says.

That might sound like a scene from some alternate universe, but the account is taken directly from an article in The New York Times about the firemen's strike of Nov. 6, 1973. On that day 30 years ago, for five and a half tense hours, most of the city's 10,900 firemen (they were all men) picketed outside their firehouses or simply watched as some 80 fires burned citywide, chanting ''Scab! Scab!'' at makeshift firefighting crews.

It was a strange, ugly moment in the city's history, one that many of the firemen who lived through it now choose to forget. The strike, the only one in the department's 138-year existence, proved the unthinkable: that the covenant between rescuer and civilian -- until then seared in the city's collective consciousness through images of burly men carrying victims from smoky tenements and tales of volunteer firemen brawling in the streets to be first to put out fires -- could be broken. Only in hindsight might there be some recognition, even appreciation, of the other covenant that remained mostly intact that day.

In spring 1973, an ambitious fireman from the South Bronx was elected president of the firemen's union. Richard J. Vizzini, a husky, balding man of 46, took office with a flourish, promising that he would bargain hard with the city. It was no small task. Mayor John V. Lindsay's administration was known for being tough with the city's labor unions; already there had been strikes and slowdowns by teachers, transit workers, police officers and sanitation workers.

Through that hot August, Mr. Vizzini pushed for a one-year contract and a $2,000 rise in the firemen's base salary of $14,300. Abruptly, in September, he declared the talks a ''charade'' and walked out. The stage was set for arbitration, or action.

In October, he mailed firefighters ballots asking whether they backed a strike. The votes were counted by the Honest Ballot Association, which, under an existing agreement, told only Mr. Vizzini the results.

At a Nov. 5 union meeting attended by thousands of firemen, Mr. Vizzini declared that his members had voted overwhelmingly to strike.

The crowd erupted. ''Strike! Strike!'' the men cried, fists raised in the air.

Mr. Vizzini, now 76 and living in Yonkers, had counted on that declaration -- and the response it received -- to give him leverage in arbitration, he said in a telephone interview last week. But early the next morning, Election Day, arbitration talks broke down. Mr. Vizzini went on WINS radio at 8:30 a.m. and told firefighters to walk out.

Inside firehouses across the city, scared and angry firemen were already milling. In a surprise effort to pre-empt the strike, the department's chief and commissioner, John T. O'Hagan, had ordered all city firemen to report to their firehouses at 8 a.m., on the theory that some of the additional men could cover for any who went on strike. It turned out to be a staggering misstep.

Men who were firefighters at the time said that before the recall they were leaning toward not striking. At a party the night before, Vincent J. Dunn, then a department chief, saw a friend from a Harlem firehouse, an outspoken union supporter, who was scheduled to work the following day.

''Bobby, are you guys going to strike?'' Chief Dunn asked.

''What, are you kidding?'' the friend replied. ''I'm not going on strike.''

But the next morning, in that Harlem firehouse and others, from Riverdale to Sheepshead Bay, from Whitestone to Tottenville, the regular crews of firemen were overwhelmed by the eerie presence of the full company. Firehouses took on the air of union meetings.

At 9 a.m., Commissioner O'Hagan began the company roll call to see which companies might strike. The first call by the Manhattan dispatch office was to Engine Company 1 on West 31st Street. Early that morning, members of Engine 1 had phoned other Manhattan companies to see who would back them, however they acted. Firemen now strained close to the department radio to hear how the company would respond.

''Engine 1 is out of service,'' a voice said. The strike had begun.

ONE by one, companies across the city went out of service until, by 10 a.m., there were no working fire companies in New York City. Firemen, gently turned out of quarters by officers who remained on the job, picketed their firehouses in the 32-degree chill, some warming their hands over fires in 55-gallon steel drums.

Then the alarm bells rang.

The department quickly organized crews of probationary firefighters (who could not strike), fire officers (who could not do firemen's work) and the handful of firemen who refused to strike. These well-intentioned but overwhelmed teams responded to 338 alarms in the next few hours, while striking firemen followed them to the emergency scenes and yelled, ''Scab!''

A shrewd man, Commissioner O'Hagan, who died in 1991, is said to have gotten a tip that Mr. Vizzini had bluffed on having enough votes to strike. At 2 p.m., in the chambers of New York Supreme Court Justice Sidney A. Fine, he and Mr. Vizzini signed a deal entering the city and the union into binding arbitration. The strike was over.

Mr. Vizzini's bluff had been called. By 4,119 to 3,827, the firemen had actually voted against a walkout. Mr. Vizzini said then, as he did last week, that he had not lied, but simply used the cheers at the Nov. 5 meeting rather than the ballot vote to gauge support.

Still the bitter situation became more confused. Some firemen felt embarrassed, some defiant. Some, who had agonized about betraying their oath to protect New York, now felt betrayed by the union president who said he was only trying to protect their interests.

And, back in the firehouses, there was the awkward question of how to deal with the conscientious objectors, the handful of men who had continued to work during the strike.

In the public's eyes, those men (it is unclear how many there were) were considered heroes who put the welfare of the city ahead of their own interests. But in firehouses, they were seen as cancers, men whose individualism threatened the very ethos of a successful firefighting operation, which, to firefighters, is itself a covenant. It is, as one department veteran explained, ''all for one and one for all.''

There was the tale of one objector, Tom Donovan, whose colleagues recalled that he was banned indefinitely from the kitchen table. Reached by phone the other day at his home in Richmond Hill, Queens, Mr. Donovan, who retired in 1997, simply said: ''Nah. It wasn't so bad.''

No deaths were reported because of the strike. The firemen who walked were not fired, but fined two days' pay under the state's Taylor Law, which forbids public employees from striking. Under the contract signed later, their salaries increased by $950. The word ''strike,'' a current union delegate said, has never been uttered at a union meeting since.

And Mr. Vizzini? He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment for the bluff, was put on three years' probation and served out his union presidency. In 1977, he was elected to a second term.

Photos: The firemen's strike of 1973 marked a strange, ugly moment in the city's history. A firehouse on East 111th Street, left, and, inset, civilians helping put out a blaze in Jamaica, Queens. (Photos by Above, Neal Boenzi/The New York Times; left, Glenn Singer)